Ultimately what I'm trying to say is that your results will be due to how much you pay google or any of the other search engines.

I honestly think we haven't seen that yet, and will continue to not see that, because the search engines know they're walking a fine line. They exist for people to get relevant search results, and if they start messing with that people will look elsewhere. Someone recently mentioned that she prefers DuckDuckGo because it's cleaner and simpler and she trusts the results more. I think Google will continue to jam in paid results around the "good stuff" but they're not going to go too far.

As far as SEO dying, I think the algo will become too smart to be easily gamed. If that means that the best results go to the pages with the best content, I'm ok with that.